No matter what health care bill emerges from Congress, roughly one in six uninsured Californians will be excluded because they are not legal residents.

President Barack Obama refers to the plan as “comprehensive health insurance reform,” though essentially none of its provisions are likely to be available to the nation’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, a group that typically receives no insurance at work and lacks the means to buy it on their own.

That means tens of thousands living in the San Jose area will remain without insurance whether or not the Senate ultimately passes a bill and no matter how generous the subsidies for the poor or punitive the penalties for those who refuse.

“It will be out of the reach of many Americans. ” That is not comprehensive,“ said Jennifer Ng’andu, deputy director of the Health Policy Project at the National Council of La Raza.

Santa Clara County has roughly 70,000 undocumented immigrants who currently receive millions of dollars worth of health care — but that care is paid for by taxpayers and often provided in local emergency rooms.

Still, many conservatives argue that providing health care for those not legally in the country is both unaffordable and unfair.

“It shouldn’t encourage future immigration or help out those who are here illegally now,” said Dustin Carnevale, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Washington-based group that advocates restricted immigration.

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FAIR estimates that U.S. taxpayers already spend $11 billion a year on health care for illegal immigrants, and that the cost would rise to $30 billion if they are offered the same subsidies as citizens in the health care bill.

Such concerns have prompted some Democrats with a long record of supporting immigrant rights, including Obama, to go out of their way to point out that undocumented immigrants are not included in the current legislation.

However, their exclusion may have some unintended consequences.

It means that a pool consisting of millions of potential customers who are typically younger and healthier than the general population will be kept out of the insurance exchanges. If undocumented immigrants were allowed to enter the exchanges and receive health insurance, it would “reduce health care costs’’ for other participants, Ng’andu said.

Undocumented immigrants will continue to use emergency rooms, which cannot turn away patients based on their immigration status, as their first line of medical treatment, a practice that cost California hospitals an estimated $1.2 billion last year, according to the state Department of Health Care Services.

Nearly 7 million California residents lack health insurance. Of that number, more than 1 million are not legal residents, according the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

Both bills now before Congress — the one passed by the House earlier this month and the one currently before the Senate — explicitly exclude undocumented immigrants from receiving benefits.

Both bills forbid anyone without legal immigration status from receiving a government subsidy, which are intended for those too poor to buy their own insurance. The Senate bill goes further, saying that they cannot participate in the measure’s insurance exchanges. That means that even undocumented immigrants who buy their own insurance will not be able to purchase the least expensive policies.

“Disease and illnesses do not discriminate based on immigration status,” Rep. Mike Honda, D-Campbell, and several other Democrats wrote in an open letter to congressional leaders, seeking to have such provisions eliminated. “It is not rational to exclude individuals who are willing and able to share in the responsibility of paying into the system. There are also public health implications when a large portion of the U.S. population has severely limited access to health care coverage.”

Yet with the measure’s outcome resting on the votes of a handful of Democrats from swing states and districts, any changes to the immigration clauses are likely to make the bills even more restrictive.

Some Republicans have pushed for tighter verification procedures in the health care bill to make certain that those who do not qualify for the government subsidies do not receive them. Democrats have resisted.

It was anger over that issue that prompted U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., to yell “You lie!’’ at Obama as the president addressed a joint session of Congress in September.

The California News Service is a journalism project of the University of California’s Washington Center and the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Contact the CNS at cns@ucdc.edu.